SIX VERY SHORT POEMS ABOUT SKETCHUAL VIOLETS
Don’t like this
Can taking be made safe
Can having be unharm
Can unharm sexy be
And having limits, probed?/Am having limits, prone?
I felt terribly touched when you
Don’t drink like that
Don’t parody your mouth
Don’t like or be
Like May came out of me
I was dismayed
⋅
Sketchual Violets
I’m at table, drawing—
Someone says “Baby
Do you want to sketch
Some Violets”
I don’t say no
Who’ll pay for
Bruisy violets
Mixed media
⋅
Gothic song (after de Nerval)
Sweet bride
I love your crying!
Its rain
Scents the flowers.
Sweet things
Bloom once.
Let us sow roses—
They go with time!
Dark or blonde—
Must one choose?
The God of the world
Is Pleasure.
⋅
The Trial
My terrible
Recunting
The story to control herself. Himself.
My terrible
Recunts until
“Unhamlich!” says the judge (“Fake meat!”).
So I tell you myself
Recant cuntrol.
⋅
We keep our great bodies safe
I enter the rose garden, a leisure place
the park designer’s name is Law
PROVEN WINNERS
COMPACT PINK INNOCENCE
to write by the little
Olmsted lake fuckoo
I mean it’s very nice I like it poetry
for men die every day for lack
of what is found there?
women don’t have time to die for that?
I totally have time this week
to say unfair to men and passing fair
McHunt was a walking mist, a
starry mist
it labeled no man’s dream
⋅
Toothless Imperative
She took the streetcar
to the Institute of Notre Dame
in Baltimore (virgins, nuns),
was gang-raped in community college
by a professor and a group
of his male students,
was raped again after Peace Corps,
when she didn’t want to go home
to her dad (who’d beaten her
for being raped), so she’d
joined a Peruvian circus
to hang by her hair,
raise spangly legs.
Don’t do that
—be a virgin, study with nuns,
raise spangly legs, hang by hair?
Don’t have kids if you do?
Don’t be raped.
§
RISING ACTION
The sky gave head to the sun
like guillotine.
A protocol called friction
made our breath audible.
The sun reappeared
adapting our shadows to a new round.
Narrative curved along our muscles
provoked them to stretch
this way and that—
we felt our pasts
extend themselves into us
till we bloomed
like an equation of working and
rabbits in a gale.
They gave us guns for killing
and we killed.
We were grateful for the labor of the gun
that turned our corner into a girl.
Though 4 out of 5 girls aren’t raped
the history of mammalia
is a history of penetration.
Girling is part of our transit
which is mass
because everyone is getting bored
through and of
penetration.
They gentled the boy inside the girl
till the girl was basic.
They gentled the girl inside the boy
till the boy was basic
and riding fascist genitals
felt like rowing.
§
Four of the poems in “Sketchual Violets” (“Don’t like this,” “Gothic Song,” “We keep our great bodies safe,” and “The Trial”) originally appeared in different form in P-Queue (Fall 2015).